Lost Opportunities at Copenhagen, Life at 3.6 Degrees Warmer

“We will need to start preparing for the symphony of catastrophes that will befall us in our bid to adapt to life at 3.6 degrees on average warmer. It appears that the back room agreement at the Copenhagen summit of world leaders on Climate Change was to try and contain temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit and to stabilize C02 at 550 parts per million (ppm) or less by 2050.

“Simultaneously we will bring online at least 1000 new coal fire burning plants, one per week in China alone. We will add 2 billion additional automobiles onto the world’s highways and fossil fuel engines will still power 70% of them. We already have a 14.5-year inventory of gasoline-powered automobiles on the road. We will be bringing an additional 2 billion more people onto an already overcrowded and overburdened planet each bringing with them a heavy carbon footprint. This will certainly swamp any real C02 reduction efforts that have been tentatively agreed to without any binding agreement or penalties for countries that do not comply.

“We have debated and denied away our best opportunity to address this problem over the last 20 years. We are now heading into a war with nature that we cannot win and may not even survive. She will not negotiate nor capitulate and has all the time in the world to wear us down then knock us out. We have had skirmishes and even some major regional battles with her before as we have dammed her rivers, cut down her forests and cleared her land.